What is on Your Mind?

I was testing Fedora 16 mostly to check the new features. One thing that caught my eye as a systems admin is the systemd which is incorporated in Fedora for quite a while now.

From the first look of it, this appears more close to Solaris's SMF. With parallelization capabilities, advanced dependency resolution and many more, it's promising to provide faster boot and quick loading of services. I liked the idea of Solaris SMF for automatic service restart after a failure. This helps us a bit when it comes to handling high-serverity and tight SLA issues due to a service failure. Also, I like "svcs -x" in Solaris to determine the cause and the remedy of a service being in maintenance mode. Linux systemd is also going the same route with different terms of course.

But then I questioned myself. Is it really necessary? Look at the two major UNIX OSes: AIX and HP-UX. They are still quite happy with Sys V init. RHEL 6 came up with Upstart with full compatibility with Sys V init, which was fine to me as I could still use /etc/init.d and /etc/rc.d/rc*.d directories to modify the scripts etc. without having to really engulf a whole new thing.

In contrast, look at Solaris SMF. How complicated they have made it to add a simple startup script with those XML files and meaningless jargons for already known things!

I am sure systemd will find its way to RHEL 7. systemd might bring a real fast boot on Linux distros for Desktop/Workstation. That's a significant thing on those platforms for sure. But, would it be worthy to complicate a system admin's work by putting systemd on an enterprise level distro for servers?

What do you think?